The term "bamboo network", or the Chinese Commonwealth, is used to conceptualize connections between certain businesses operated by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. It links the overseas Chinese community of Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore) with the economies of Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and ******). Overseas Chinese companies have a prominent role in the private sector of Southeast Asia, and are usually managed as family businesses with a centralized bureaucracy. The Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, writing in The New York Review of Books, dubbed the bamboo network "the greatest Asian economic power outside of Japan."